Python collections random.choice challange

Question

Here's what i have to do
Create a function named nchoices() that takes an iterable and an integer. The function should return a list of n random items from the iterable where n is the integer. Duplicates are allowed.
I can't get it right if anybody could help me out :D
```choices.py
import random
n = list(range(50))
def nchoices(iter1, integer):
  return random.choice(n), n = integer 
```

John Lindsey · Accepted Answer

Hi Nicholas,
I have the answer below. So first, you imported random. This will help us to get our random integer that we will use as an index for our iterable. I did "from random import randint" because this allows me to use randint without typing random.randint. If you just want to use "import random", then just put "random." in front of randint. Next we will define the function choices and give it too parameters (I named them iterable and integ). It wants us to return a list so I created an empty list at the beginning of the function. The problem is asking for us to return random items from the iterable we passed it. An example would be, say we passed nchoices "hello" as the iterable and 3 as the integ. This would mean that our list would contain 3 letters from "hello" (and the same letter could appear more than once). So we create a for loop. I used and underscore in my for loop statement because we will not need to reference it anywhere. It is just being used as a counter. We will want the for loop to iterate as many times as we said in the integ parameter (in our example 3). This is done with the range(integ). Then we just extend the list. In the extend we will want to use a random number as our index for the iterable. So in the brackets after our iterable variable, we put "randint(0, len(iterable)-1)".  This will generate a random integer from 0 to one less than the length of the iterable so we can get every possible letter. Then all we have to do is return the list that we created after the for loop has completed. Hope this helps!
~~~python
from random import randint
def nchoices(iterable, integ):
    returnlist = []
    for _ in range(integ):
        returnlist.extend(iterable[randint(0, len(iterable)-1)])
    return return_list
~~~

Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Looking to learn something new?

Nicholas Anstis

Nicholas Anstis

Python collections random.choice challange

1 Answer

John Lindsey

John Lindsey

Nicholas Anstis

Nicholas Anstis

pet

pet